Wondering what happened to Googles page ranking? Yes it is dead; Toolbar PageRank (PR), one of the Googles most important feature is officially killed, on March 7, 2016. So, from now on SEO and webmasters cannot use page rank score anymore.
Introduction to Googles Page Rank
In 2000, the first version of the Google Toolbar for the Internet Explorer was released. This toolbar made Google search easy within IE. Page rank algorithm used by Google search helped various websites to rank in their search results. This was the first and the best search algorithm used by Google for link analysis. Some of the features added to Google Toolbar were
- Pop-up blocker
- Online bookmarks
- Custom buttons
- Automatic translation
- Inline find-in-page
- Spell checking
- A lot more
Gradually Internet explorers market decreased and other search engines like Mozilla Firefox and Google chrome became popular. Chrome is currently the dominant search engine compare to all others. The last major toolbar by Google was released in 2011 but now the toolbar is taking up a lot of storage space. As a result, the systems are getting slow down. This is one among the major reason for Google to discontinue its toolbar.
PR lets you know how Google assesses the importance of the page you’re viewing. Here are some signs which will help you know that PR is dead.
- PR data was removed
- Fewer PR updates
- PR was not added to Chrome
Do not worry too much about Page Rank Toolbar. All that matters is your websites ranking and not the green bar. Contact us to discuss your SEO requirements and get the best results for your websites.
